Hasta La Gadget!

Ballmer and Elop were quite the pair during the Microsoft keynote yesterday, so let’s say the bar’s been set pretty high for Eric Schmidt. But that’s fine, the now-former CEO of Google has a knack for lively (if not downright controversial at times) speeches. This is the first time we’ve seen him talk since he stepped away from Babysitter (his words) to Executive Chairman, and the Android of today is a few flavors improved from the 2.1 Eclair that had launched a little before his MWC 2010 keynote — so needless to say, we’re excited for what he has to say today. We’ll be reporting live from Fira, so stay tuned — the fun should start around 11:45AM ET!

Continue reading Live from Eric Schmidt’s MWC 2011 keynote

Live from Eric Schmidt’s MWC 2011 keynote originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 15 Feb 2011 11:25:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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BARCELONA — Amidst a spew of product announcements comes HTC’s new flagship phone, the Incredible S. If you already have the Droid Incredible S, it may look familiar, but the HTC-branded version is actually pretty different.

First, it has HTC’s lovely Sense UI, this time built on top of Android 2.2. Sense makes the whole Android experience much slicker and more intuitive to use. Coupled with the spectacular screen, a four-inch Super LED with a 800 x 480 resolution (the Droid has a 3.7-inch OLED display), swiping around is a lot of fun. A 1GHz Qualcomm CPU, 768MB RAM and a gig of internal storage complete the computer part, and then we get on to the cameras.

Up front is a 1.3MP webcam, and around the back is an 8MP, autofocus behemoth, also capable of shooting 720p video.

Flip the Incredible S on its side and not only does the image rotate, as you’d expect, but the little light-up capacitive buttons on the side also rotate to stay “upright”. It’s a nice touch.

Despite its bigger screen, the Incredible S feels pretty slim and light, and I’d be happy to put one in my pocket. Unfortunately, the HTC stand at the Mobile World Congress has everything wired up tight to screeching alarms, so I left the display unit where it was. Available in the second quarter of the year.

See Also:

• HTC Incredible Is a Tiny, Yet Mighty Smartphone
• Incredible

BARCELONA — HTC’s take on tablets is one of the most interesting at this year’s Mobile World Congress. The little seven-inch aluminum unibody package comes with a pressure-sensitive stylus. This might be enough to set the Flyer apart in the increasingly crowded (and dull) “me too” Android tablet world.

Inside the fat (415 gram) little box is a 1.5GHz single-core processor, 1GB RAM and 32GB storage. There is also an SD-slot to add more. Round back there’s a 5MP camera, and on the front panel there’s a 1.3MP webcam. The screen gives a rather respectable 1024 x 600 resolution, and is your usual multitouch panel. These are still handmade prototypes, so the final version is likely to be lighter and thinner.

But we came for the pen, right? Because a capacitive panel doesn’t register pressure, the pen does the measuring instead, and passes the information wirelessly back to the tablet. This is clearly meant for handwriting recognition (the tablet will ship with Evernote built in), but is also perfect for painting and drawing apps. Using a stylus with a capacitive screen is a great way to draw, but the lack of pressure-controlled line thickness and other parameters means it’ll never rival a proper graphics pad.

The Flyer will launch in the second half of the year, and will ship with Android 2.3 Gingerbread. What, no Honeycomb? That will come later, as an over-the-air upgrade. Because HTC uses its own heavily tweaked Sense UI in its Android handsets, the interface is more suited to a tablet than that of, say, Samsung’s Galaxy Tab. In fact, time needed to tweak the brand new Honeycomb is the reason that the Flyer will ship without it.

As for price, HTC isn’t saying. Keep it cheap, though, and this Kindle-sized, pocket-friendly could make a great artist’s sketchbook.

See Also:

• New Digital Scribe Pen Writes Directly to PC With Real Ink …
• Report: HTC Planning Three Android Tablets in 2011

Well, well — what have we here? That up above is LG’s Revolution, a Snapdragon-powered Android superphone. What’s inside is no normal Snapdragon, though. It’s actually a newfangled chip that isn’t shipping to consumers just yet, which includes DRM libraries at a hardware level that serve to satisfy paranoid movie execs. The good news is that Qualcomm has actually whipped up a solution that’ll finally bring Watch Instantly to Android; the bad news is that existing smartphones — even existing Snapdragon devices — will not be able to utilize the app. Without new hardware, the Android version of the Netflix app simply won’t function, and no one at Qualcomm was willing to tell us when these Netflix-friendly Snapdragon chips would begin to ship out.

Whenever that fateful day arrives, though, Snapdragon devices with HDMI sockets will be able to beam that content right to their HDTV — the company’s hardware is HDCP-approved, so there’s no sweat when it comes to watching content on the big screen. On-site representatives made clear that both the phone and the app were for demonstration purposes only, but we’d be shocked if LG’s handset shipped without this compatibility. The demo we saw was smooth as butter, and the app itself looked glorious on the Revolution’s 4.3-inch touchscreen. See for yourself in the video just past the break.

Continue reading Android-powered LG Revolution caught streaming Netflix at MWC (video)

Android-powered LG Revolution caught streaming Netflix at MWC (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 15 Feb 2011 07:53:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Boy oh boy, HTC is entering the tablet arena with quite a bang. The company has just taken the wraps off its brand new 7-inch Flyer Android tablet, which touts a 1.5GHz single-core CPU, 1GB of RAM plus 32GB of flash storage, an aluminum unibody construction, 1024 x 600 resolution, a tablet-optimized version of Sense, and… what’s this, a pressure-sensitive stylus! The HTC Scribe trademark we saw floating around in legal waters turned out not to be the branding for a tablet, it’s actually the name HTC gives to the technology enabling what it calls a “groundbreaking pen experience.” Other details include a 5 megapixel camera on the back paired with a 1.3 megapixel imager up front, a 4000mAh battery rated to last for four hours of continuous video playback, and memory expandability via a microSD card.

The Flyer will ship in Q2 2011 with Android Gingerbread 2.4 on board. HTC says it’ll be indistinguishable from 2.3 as far the end user is concerned, though we all know it won’t be quite as good as the 3.0 stuff. We’re told not to worry, however, since the new version of Sense being introduced with the Flyer will be the focal point of the company’s software offering. As far as HTC is concerned, Sense matters more than the underlying platform, and the reason Honeycomb isn’t the shipping OS here was explicitly stated as HTC not having enough time with the latest Google code to customize it to the full requirements of Sense. Guess that settles that.

There are a couple more software enhancements, both marking the introduction of the fruits of HTC’s recent deals: OnLive cloud gaming will be coming with the Flyer in the form of an app you open up to access the web-connected bored-relieving service, while that Saffron Digital acquisition has turned into an HTC Watch app for movie streaming and downloading.

We spent a bit of quality time with a Flyer unit recently, although we weren’t allowed to turn it on, and our early impressions are rather mixed. On the one hand, we do appreciate the ruggedness and durability that’s afforded by the one-piece aluminum shell, but on the other, the Flyer is quite the chunky beast in your hands. We’d imagine strapping in such an extra-speedy processor is the main culprit for its extra girth, though the Flyer is, ironically enough, not terribly light either. We found it heavier and generally a lot less polished from a design perspective than Samsung’s Galaxy Tab. Anyhow, HTC should have functional units for us immediately following its MWC presser this morning, and we’ll be delving in deeper with this super-specced device. Hang tight!

Update: Pictures of the Flyer can now be explored below and we have video awaiting your audience just past the break.

Update 2: Even more video!

Continue reading HTC launches 1.5GHz, 7-inch Android 2.4 Flyer into the tablet wars (update: hands-on video!)

HTC launches 1.5GHz, 7-inch Android 2.4 Flyer into the tablet wars (update: hands-on video!) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 15 Feb 2011 05:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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